Jabra’s earbuds are going away, but the impact they made isn’t

Mere hours after announcing two new pairs of earbuds, Jabra parent company GN revealed that the Elite 10 Gen 2 and Elite 8 Active Gen 2 will mark the end of its consumer earbud business. That’s all she wrote for the long-running Elite series after years of quality products.

The decision seems somewhat abrupt; earlier this month, Jabra invited select press on an “all-expenses-paid media trip” to its Copenhagen headquarters. (The Verge did not attend.) Now, just a couple weeks later, GN is acknowledging that “markets have changed” and trying to compete with Apple, Samsung, Sony, and countless other earbud brands is no longer worth the cost.

“The investment required for future innovation and growth in this very competitive space is deemed unjustified,” GN wrote in its press release. It doesn’t get much more blunt than that. There’s must more money to be made in enterprise hardware and hearing aid tech.

I’m sad to see Jabra bowing out. I was looking forward to testing out the company’s new LE Audio charging case, which can transmit audio from other devices like treadmills or in-flight entertainment to the earbuds. That excitement has already dampened now that the end is in sight — even if GN says it’ll continue to support existing Jabra hardware for several years.

But I can also concede that Jabra’s best days in the consumer market have been behind it for some time now. In the early stages of true wireless earbuds, when many products were plagued by audio dropouts and other annoyances, the company carved out a solid reputation for itself. The Elite series became the de facto recommendation for those seeking an alternative to Apple’s AirPods. I used the same review headline twice in a row in praise of their quality. For a company that had previously been best known for dorky Bluetooth earpieces, it was an impressive feat.

The peak for Jabra was really in that Elite 65t / 75t era between 2018 and 2020, when heavyweights like Sony and Samsung were still finding their footing with true wireless buds and before a raft of other competition got into the ring. This was also when the company began including a feature — multipoint Bluetooth connectivity — that took bigger players ages to implement in their own buds.

Multipoint allows you to pair with two devices at the same time, so you can be listening to music on your laptop and then seamlessly take a call on your phone. We’ve finally reached a point where this feature has (mostly) become the status quo now that Sony, Google, Sennheiser, and others are offering it. Technics’ AZ80 earbuds even let you pair with three devices at once. The big multipoint holdout remains AirPods, but Apple would tell you that its automatic switching between iPhones, iPads, and Macs is a better solution anyhow.

Jabra got other things right, too. I always liked its mobile app. Sure, it was stuffed to the gills with features that some people probably didn’t even know were there — like white noise and nature soundscapes — but it always worked reliably when it came to adjusting EQ or updating the earbuds’ firmware.

But Jabra being surpassed by its much bigger rivals was inevitable. The company reached a point where it just couldn’t hang anymore in crucial areas like sound quality, noise cancellation, and so on. We’re increasingly seeing Apple, Samsung, and Google save the best ecosystem tricks for their own earbuds, which didn’t help matters. And more recently, the Elite lineup got a little too bloated and started trending toward quantity over quality. The best thing I can say about last year’s Elite 10 earbuds is that they’re extremely comfortable. But they never stood much of a chance at replacing my current favorites.

It’s a shame to see the company go, but it’s walking away from a market that’s never been more competitive across every pricing tier. So much so that GN just doesn’t see the point anymore.